1. Field of the Invention
This invention is related to the field of client-server communication, and more particularly, to a system and method for sending 3D scene graph data, and updates to scene graph data, between clients and servers.
2. Description of the Related Art
A three-dimensional (3D) window system may include a display server which communicates with one or more clients. The display server maintains a scene graph. The 3D window system allows clients to create scene graph nodes in the display server, connect nodes to other nodes, and to modify the attributes of nodes. Such a 3D window system is described by Elmqvist in Technical Report no. 2003-04, entitled “3Dwm: A Platform for Research and Development of Three-Dimensional User Interfaces”, published by the Dept. of Computing Science at Chalmers University of Technology and Göteborg University.
The protocol used by 3Dwm to communicate scene graph information between client and display server has the property that each individual operation (e.g., node creation, node connection, node attribute modification) is sent to the display server as a separate protocol request. In addition to the unique information contained in each protocol request, a protocol request contains certain control information to indicate what the request is and how the display server should satisfy the request. This extra information is called the “request packet header”. This extra information increases the number of bytes of data in the protocol packet of the request and increases the time required to transmit the request through the communication channel and to process the request in the display server. Thus, improved systems, methods and protocols for communicating scene graph management information between clients and display servers are greatly to be desired, especially systems, methods and protocols that provide decreased protocol overhead and increased performance.